Big Data

What we have done.

Since the mid-critt session last friday we slightly changed our idea, to have a bigger focus on storytelling in our idea. We also considered the feedback we got from the panel, and how we can change our idea and presentation technique.

What we will do.

Our next step is to refine our concept so we have a clear understanding on how big data and storytelling coincides. We will pitch this idea to our teachers and other groups to make sure that we are on the right track.

Challenges encountered.

The biggest challenge we encountered is that big data isn't a technology per se, and to be able to find or create a future scenario we need to have a technology that explains the changes brought to the table. The problem here was that we were trespassing into other groups areas, something that we needed to avoid.

We have also had a hard time coming up with exactly how big data can evolve, since it is rather a concept thena  technology, if we change the concept, it isn't big data anymore. We will focus more on how big data will change the future of storytelling, then how big data will change itself.

Changes in the project.

Our biggest change is that we have shifted our focus. We are now focusing more on storytelling and how big data can affect it in the future, than focusing on the future of big data. Our idea now is to create a  concept of how a computer can create stories based on breaking news and similar historical occurrences, and create that story in just one second. All the information gathered and used to construct the story is gathered from databases worldwide.

Our vision is to evolve breaking news, and create breaking stories instead.

Resources.

Below are some literature we have used.

Lohr, S. (2012). The age of big data. New York Times, 11.

Labrinidis, A., & Jagadish, H. V. (2012). Challenges and opportunities with big data. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, 5(12), 2032-2033.

McAfee, A., Brynjolfsson, E., Davenport, T. H., Patil, D. J., & Barton, D. (2012). Big data. The management revolution. Harvard Bus Rev, 90(10), 61-67.

Couldry, N., & Turow, J. (2014). Advertising, big data and the clearance of the public realm: marketers' new approaches to the content subsidy. International Journal of Communication, 8, 1710-1726

Below are some articles we used

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/538916/big-data-and-the-future-of-business/

http://bigdata.teradata.com/US/Big-Ideas/The-Future-of-Big-Data/

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2991999/big-data/the-future-of-big-data-is-very-very-fast.html

http://www.cnbc.com/2015/06/09/best-way-to-bet-on-the-future-of-big-data.html

http://readwrite.com/2015/04/02/big-data-streaming-no-more-batch-processing

https://datafloq.com/read/future-big-data-use-cases-prescriptive-analytics/668

Packaged Stories (Moving Images)

What we have done and Changes in the project

Before the Mid-crit session last Friday we changed our first idea, What If, to another idea called From Floor to Store which we presented. We discussed the reason why we changed the first idea in our previous weekly report. Our new vision was to display the story of a product through a video on the surface of its package-container. After receiving feedback from the jury we discussed how to continue on with the project and decided to broaden the idea a bit. We changed the name to Packaged Stories and instead of displaying the story of a product we want to provide companies and organizations the opportunity to display any story on their product. We think that the name Packaged Stories is better in line with our idea.

We are very happy with our presentation and the feedback we got. The comments and inputs we received was relevant and important for us in our continuation of developing the project. For example, we agreed with the jury members who said that we did not need to narrow down our solution the way we had chosen to. Instead, we were told that our concept was greater than our example cases and as such, we should aim to encompass a lot more. Thus we decided that our solution should allow anyone to tell any story on their product, instead of just the story of said product. We’ve also been working on incorporating storytelling more in our project, mainly through discussion and decisions aimed at increasing its very emphasis during the presentation.

This week we’ve been focusing on doing more research about the technologies and bioplastics, and we have also started to write the book chapter. Since we think it would be of importance to get more feedback and inputs from different scientists and industry RnD-personnel in the field we contacted a few interesting persons which we hope to be able to book a meeting with.  

What we will do

First and foremost our goal is to finish the text for the book chapter, we feel that in order to really focus on our presentation, we need to have the paper done. This will bring about two major benefits; first of we will have a solid, semi-scientific foundation on which we can base our solution, secondly we want to put all our focus on the movie without anything else to do on the side. Since the deadline of the text is before the video we wanted to have the text done first. In order to accomplish this however, we require some answers from the people we have already contacted (the above mentioned scientists and industry RnD-personnel), since they will be able to shed some light on the finer details of the technology that our solution is depending on.

Once we have all the appropriate material, we will decide upon how to structure the text and get to finish the actual writing. As of this moment we do not know the actual limitations of the text, but we are confident the format will have been presented by the time we get to work.

Then, when we are done with our text, we will commence the planning and preparations for the final presentation. Maybe not surprisingly, we are going to create a great movie to present our idea in a thorough and convincing manner. In order to achieve this there must be a preparation phase to the movie as well, meaning we need to write a script that is both entertaining and conveys our idea at the same time. We have great ambitions and our movie is going to be the result of many hours of work.

Challenges encountered

The work in our group has been really good this week and we haven’t encountered that many problems. We had a discussion about the goal of the project and presentation, if we were supposed to represent a product (like a company) or if we just should present a vision of the future with our concept. We decided to talk to Malin about this and after that we were all on the same page about the goal.

Overall, our group is really good at collaboration and we have a very good group dynamic which makes our group work well together.

Virtual Reality

The work we have done this week is mostly a reaction to the critique that we got during the mid crit-session. Some of the critique that we got was that we didn't bring anything new to the table since other news companies are now working on broadcasting news through virtual reality. So we needed to be more futuristic in a sense and do something in our own niche. Another question that occurred was if we saw ourselves as a company that both created news and distributed it or if we just distributed news that others been created.

We have been trying to answer those question. That has resulted in a, sort of, new concept, at least a new approach within our project. We want to present the news in a more interactive way compared with our previous way to distribute the news. Previously we were presenting the news in a 360 degree view, but now we will also include interaction. The user will be able to interact with people where the news are taking place. Other sort of interaction might as well be added during the process.

We have also decided to change the type of news we will distribute. Our idea now is a crowdsourcing news company. The idea is basically that people, all around the world, capture the news on their own and then sends the news to us and we distribute it through our "We Are News"-service. We are still presenting it in virtual reality which means that the crowd sourcing will be based on recording in 360 degrees. Today that would not be realistic since there is not that many people that own such equipment but we believe that in the future it will be more common, we believe that such availability of equipment will increase in the same speed as virtual reality. The news will be rated by the user in order to prioritize them and get rid of, in a sense, the bad news that will be sent to our service, since they will be unprioritized. The rating system will make it easier for everyone to keep track of what is popular at the time.

There are some problem we need to sort:

-One problem that has occurred to us is the validity of the news. Should we validate the news? or should we just distribute it?

-Who will do the “cutting” or process the news to make it interactable?

Next step is to try to answer those question and we want some feedback of our new approach, perhaps through a meeting with Malin or/and Daniel.

We got a mail from Anna Careborg about an opportunity to do a virtual reality reportage for SvD, we have been discussing that offer and considered how that might fit into our project and the possibilities to work on it. That part is still under discussion.

Point of View

What we have done
On the mid-crit session we presented the idea with the focus on making it easier to aggregate information from several sources into a seamless interface.This will make the process of reading information from different sources easier and more nuanced. Basically our idea was that the user could change point of view in the middle of the story that he is reading and then the text analysis algorithm will fetch the same story from another source and seamlessly change the story into the new point of view. Then the user can continue reading the story at the same place as before the change. Our aim was not to solve the entire problem since we think that people will always have a point of view on stories. What we want to do is to create an awareness of that a story can be seen from different points of view. On the mid-crit session we got a lot of good feedback:

• Do we really need another/this platform? 
• Why focus on text, isn’t video the future? 
• Maybe try to incorporate the emotions
• Copyright Issues 
• Try to visualize that the filter bubble is a real and very complex problem 
• First picture in the slide explains the problem very well and in a easy way

First picture on our slideshow

Since last Friday we have discussed a lot and talked about the feedback we got. Basically we have gone back to the drawing board a bit. Point of View-filters is a really complex subject and it could be a difficult subject to understand. Hence, we talk a lot on trying to make a product that is as easy to understand as the first picture on the slide-show we had. Daniel Pargman sent us a video that showed 6 photographers that shoot the same man but had got a different story on who he was. In this case the PoV was based on the person’s story and the results where 6 very different images.

6 different photographers portraying the same man but with a different story
From upper left: Fisherman, Alcoholic, Millionaire, Convict, Life Saver and Psychic

Based on this we had discussions that revolved around question such as “What is PoV-filters”, “How do we make people understand what it is in a short period of time”, “How do we solve it in an easy and understandable way”.

Challenges we have encountered

One of the biggest challenges we had with our initial idea is that it is very complex and it is hard to visualize it for the audience. All of us really like the idea of working with PoV in text-format. But all of our discussions didn’t really seem to result in a good solution. Our ideas around PoV in text often resulted in very “heavy” discussions and sometimes it felt like we tried to come up with a solution that would have solved the Israel-Palestine conflict. Our ideas were everything from visualizing PoV in a vector space (similar to how search engines base their search result) and about making a service that provided debate articles with counter debate articles in a seamless interface. But none of these ideas felt right for us and we also had the issue with that technology we would use is not “future” enough, since its already exists today. We also had a discussion with Anna Careborg, who really liked our initial idea. But this as well resulted in the conclusion that our idea and technology is not “future” enough for this project.

Changes we have done

Based on the problems described above we ended up talking about how to make people aware of PoV filters. We came up with that if we could present the concept to children in an easy and fun way, they would be aware of the concept and hopefully this knowledge would follow them as they got older as well. So, how do we present this complex subject to children? Based on the ideas of the google cube and the video of the 6 photographers, we came up with the thought that children always watch Disney (or other animated) movies over and over again. But the story is always told in the same way, i.e. from the protagonist PoV. Ariel vs. Ursula, Snowwhite vs. Step-mom, Simba vs Scar and so on. What if you could see the same movie but told from a different perspective? E.g. maybe Ariel is an annoying teenager that runs away all the time and Ursula only wants the best for here and therefore acts the way she does. Same story, completely different PoV. Our thought was that this might be a very fun way to introducing the concept of PoV to children. Since most children movies today are animated with vectors we could use that data and transform it with automated animation to make new movies and then apply voice synthesis. Hence, we would use the same material that Disney already produced but only rewrite the story. We also talked about that this might be a trend. E.g. Disney produced the movie Maleficent, which is the story of Sleeping Beauty told from the antagonist PoV. Since we would work with already existing material, Disney would not need to produce yet another costly movie, our product will do that for them more or less for free.

What we will do

Our next step is to talk to Gabriel Skantze and Jonas Beskow at TMH about voice synthesis and Maria Romero and Björn Thuresson about the movie animation. We also need to do research about how to make the new storyline for these movies. Would AI be able to do it or do we need a human writer? Another issue is copyright and who we will sell this service to.

Resources

None at this time.

Other

Because we changed our idea completely we would very like much to have a meeting with Daniel and Malin next week.

We're famous, sort of

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The online KTH School of Computer Science and Communication newsletter wrote a text about our course (in Swedish) and here it is.

Storytelling in the news

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Here's a both serious and comic 2-minute summary of every news report you have ever seen. This clip is funny but it also dissects and analyses the conventional format of telling news stories on TV.

This is Charlie Brooker from his TV show Newswipe.
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Some good links to Storytelling

Media Tech student Viktor Leandersson would like to tell you all about a ted talk and a video worth watching:

Ett bra tedtalk på ämnet vi jobbar med :)

https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story?language=sv

Samt en riktigt bra film på virtual reality (VR) som användning för storytelling

https://vimeo.com/138790270

Thanks Viktor!